


Regular Miracles

by TheMarchingBand



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Character Study, Gen, Headcannon explosions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-06
Updated: 2013-12-06
Packaged: 2018-01-03 15:31:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1072120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheMarchingBand/pseuds/TheMarchingBand
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was a time in fourth grade where Jehan read King of Shadows and then proceeded to read every book the school library owned about William Shakespeare, no matter how dull or loquacious the autobiography</p><p>Jehan admits that saying he gets a bit obsessive would be rather an understatement.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Regular Miracles

**Author's Note:**

> My writing style is apparently faux introspective rambling now, sorry about that :P  
> This is actually part of a longer thing I hope to write (one with actual plot and things oooo) but who knows if that will ever actually happen.  
> Also sorry for how OOC this will probably be to most people.  
> Ah well, read on if you dare, my dears.

There was a time in fourth grade where Jehan read King of Shadows and then proceeded to read every book the school library owned about William Shakespeare, no matter how dull or loquacious the autobiography. He memorized sonnets, he studied the Globe, he bought the Complete Works of William Shakespeare for his birthday and stumbled through the dense historical verbiage for days to satisfy his new found love of the Bard.

Jehan admits that saying he gets a bit obsessive would be rather an understatement. The numerous and varied passions he's had through the years-the interests that appear with all-consuming intensity and never truly fade even as a new fascination arrives to take its place-are catalogued in the disarrayed file cabinets of his brain, in the debris that clings to the bottoms of drawers and slips behind cabinets, the things that remain as each new tidal wave of knowledge he pours into his brain sweeps the old stuff out.

For example the precise 109 digits of pi he memorized for a math competition he was desperately determined to win; a competition for sixth grade math class, just to clarify the utter ridiculousness of the situation. Jehan recited the numbers from memory for days, annoying his friends with pleas for them to double check the digits, spacing out in class as he studied the pi poster on the door, ridiculously determined to succeed, no matter how many numbers his classmates might have memorized.

None of his classmates had memorized any. A few got up to 3.14159265….before giving up and one wise-ass started listing "chocolate, apple, key lime…" to the class' amusement. And so he won, practically by default. His brief affair with pi, remains tucked away in his mind, all 109 digits, a funny quirk brought up to impress friends and class mates and people in bars on Friday nights.

_3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459230781640628620899862803482534211706798214808_

a fragmented ribbon of numbers, beautiful and unending and the very data and definition of immortal, is tucked away in a box of odds and ends that his mind will never get around to scrapbooking. Its digits lay next to the sonnet from King of Shadows that he had memorized after its honesty, its pure shimmering words had brought him to tears, long before he learned that over the years it had been delegated to wedding speeches, overused and insincere and unloved, like nobody quite saw the beauty in it, how it was too broad and all consuming to simply refer to marital connections rather than huge, terrifying, unstoppable love that could face down tempests.

He's tucked that one away like a bookmark in the pages of the 1st Harry Potter book that he has read so many times he can recite lines from memory, can imagine it's worn cover and ripped pages and finger-smudged ink, the spine falling to shreds from the times he's poured over it trying to recapture the childlike hope and wonder he'd had upon reading it for the first time. The closest he ever comes is when he picks it back up again after finishing the last one, and it's not quite the same, but he can see the beauty in symmetry, in coming full circle, in understanding how the painful truths of the last will never destroy the naive joy of the first.

He admits he also has the entirety of the lyrics to American Pie scribbled on the walls up there somewhere from when he had learned the tragedy behind its origins and had sat and, for the first time, truly _listened_ to what it was saying.

He has poems about happiness and life and love, of euphoria and mortality and infatuation, bookmarked in his brain, sometimes whole passages pasted on the walls of his mind, sometimes just a line, just a phrase that had made his skin tingle when he read it, that had made him wish he could become part of the universe, escape his skin and float on up into the Milky Way.

There's

_hope is a thing with feathers_

_that perches in the soul_

and

_I'm nobody_

_are you nobody too?_

from Emily Dickinson, his first true poetic love affair, along with

t _he universe is ever expanding_

_inexorably pushing into the vacuum_

_galaxies swallowed by galaxies_

_whole solar systems collapsing_

_all of it acted out in silence_

from a class project years ago

even

_we were all born on days when too many people died in terrible ways_

_but you still have to call it a birthday_

and

_getting the wind knocked out of you_

_is the only way to remind your lungs_

_how much they like the taste of air_

from when he thought that all he wanted in life was to be a spoken word poet, until the stage-fright and fear and self-loathing he hated so much had reminded him why that was a bad idea, why he was a bad idea, why living was maybe not the best decision either and really that's quite enough said about that.

It's all mixed up in there with Keats and Yeats, Plath, Frost, Thoreau, Poe, a self indulgent bit of Shel Silverstein and even a stubborn few lines of Kubla Khan 

_caverns measureless to man_

and

_the milk of paradise_

that are scattered across desks, sticking out of corners and cabinets, wedged into crevices and air ducts

wallpapering his mind and lungs and aorta

pulsing in his blood stream, swirls of black ink in with deep red when he imagines it.

There was a time when he had tried to memorize his own poetry, to imprint it in his mind like all the rest, before he found that the point of his poems was to let those excess bits of himself-the feelings and thoughts that overwhelmed and overflowed until they made the stitches of his soul strain under the pressure-out of his head and that shoving them back in was rather defeating the purpose and only succeeding in polluting his writing with the self-doubt and misery that lurked in the dark corners.

So Jehan writes his poems down whenever he can, letting the words escape him and flow out of his hands onto arms and jeans and napkins and walls.

The good poems though, the truly good ones, he writes in his notebook, the one that Grantaire gave him for his birthday the second year they'd been friends, after Jehan had sat down the first day in Junior year English Lit  and Comp next to a dark haired boy who was drawing intricate geometric patterns into the title page of The Great Gatsby with glum intensity.

"Hi!" Jehan had said with a smile. The boy had startled and wide dark eyes, framed with thick lashes and purpling shadows, had lifted up to meet Jehan's, widening as they took in his floor length skirt and combat boots an flower studded braid.

"Hi", the boy had eventually replied, a small smile brightening his face from the inside, like a paper lantern, fragile and beautiful and joyous and capable of bringing so much light, and Jehan's smile had widened until he thought it might break his face.

Grantaire had handed over the journal in a swaddling of old newspapers, with a nonchalant shrug that Jehan knew meant he had spent hours pouring over bookstores to find the perfect one, but that he was going to resolutely play it off as nothing as he so often did. And Jehan had pulled his friend into a hug, resting his chin on R's curls and knowing that Grantaire would understand all the things Jehan wasn't saying, the same way the Jehan understood all of his.

Sometimes Jehan feels guilty for all the passions he's left behind. For the art classes he stopped taking, and the story he never finished writing, and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare book that has been steadily collecting dust on the top of his bookshelf. His friends call him a free spirit, a flower child, but he fears that his nature too closely borders fickle, he worries that he'll find a new love and turn around one day to find that all of the things he cares about now were abandoned far behind him while he wasn't paying attention. And isn't that just the most irrational thing? But, to be honest, he never was the sort of child to be cautious with his toys. All of his ended up losing fingers and gears, while gaining scrapes and nicks and grass stains. It wasn't that he didn't love them, no one could accuse Jean Prouvaire of loving things with anything short of his whole heart, but rather that he attempted to love too many things for his heart to stretch across. Sometimes he hates his wild nature.

It's his friends that keep him grounded. For there is nothing, not a single particle in the entire vast and unknowable universe, that could be capable of making him stop loving them.They remind him that he is not truly that wild, not truly that fickle, not truly that selfish, as he never has to fear that he will ever leave them behind. It is a singularly impossible thought that there might be anything in this world he could love more than his friends.

He loves them in spite of their faults, including their faults, _because_ of their faults, in a way that he has never truly been able to put down into poetry without it devolving into rambling descriptions of how Enjolras's red coat and Combeferre's glasses and Courfeyrac's stupid bowties and Bousset's bald head and Joly's medical textbooks and Feuilly's freckles and Bahorel's tattoos and Marius's silly lovesick grin and Eponine's heavy combat boots and Gavroche's chipped front tooth and Grantaire's paint-stained fingertips give him a honey-sweet golden feeling that can really only be described as _home_.

And, yes Jehan knows that he is a sincere and passionate _sap_ , but he has said already that he can get a bit obsessive and _Les Amis_ are really the best obsession he's ever going to have.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> YAY YOU DID IT  
> YOU'RE DONE  
> THANKS FOR READING


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